Men and Women Really Do Think Differently

By Bjorn Carey |
January 20, 2005 09:12am ET

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Men and women do think differently, at least where the anatomy of the
brain is concerned, according to a new study.

The brain is made primarily of two different types of tissue, called gray matter
and white matter. This new research reveals that men think more with their gray
matter, and women think more with white. Researchers stressed that just because
the two sexes think differently, this does not affect intellectual performance.

Psychology professor Richard Haier of the University of California, Irvine
led the research along with colleagues from the University of New Mexico. Their
findings show that in general, men have nearly 6.5 times the amount of gray
matter related to general intelligence compared with women, whereas women have
nearly 10 times the amount of white matter related to intelligence compared
to men.

"These findings suggest that human evolution has created two different
types of brains designed for equally intelligent behavior," said Haier,
adding that, "by pinpointing these gender-based intelligence areas, the
study has the potential to aid research on dementia and other cognitive-impairment
diseases in the brain."

The results are detailed in the online version of the journal NeuroImage.

The results from this study may help explain why men and women excel at different
types of tasks, said co-author and neuropsychologist Rex Jung of the University
of New Mexico. For example, men tend to do better with tasks requiring more
localized processing, such as mathematics, Jung said, while women are better
at integrating and assimilating information from distributed gray-matter regions
of the brain, which aids language skills.

Scientists find it very interesting that while men and women use two very different
activity centers and neurological pathways, men and women perform equally well
on broad measures of cognitive ability, such as intelligence tests.

This research also gives insight to why different types of head injuries are
more disastrous to one sex or the other. For example, in women 84 percent of
gray matter regions and 86 percent of white matter regions involved in intellectual
performance were located in the frontal lobes, whereas the percentages of these
regions in a man's frontal lobes are 45 percent and zero, respectively. This
matches up well with clinical data that shows frontal lobe damage in women to
be much more destructive than the same type of damage in men.

Both Haier and Jung hope that this research will someday help doctors diagnose
brain disorders in men and women earlier, as well as provide help designing
more effective and precise treatments for brain damage.

Author Bio

Bjorn Carey,

Bjorn Carey is the science information officer at Stanford University. He has written and edited for various news outlets, including Live Science's Life's Little Mysteries, Space.com and Popular Science. When it comes to reporting on and explaining wacky science and weird news, Bjorn is your guy. He currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his beautiful son and wife.